Blog

• None Overlapping Magisterium (NOMA)
• Follow the lines of inquiry suitable for your realm
• “NOMA cuts both ways”
• (Why does eternal life mean we cannot mourn our loss today?)
• Science does not perfect the mind or prevent justification of immortality
• It is a strange god that would make creatures suffer for us to learn a lesson

• Prosperity eroded trust in our neighbors (because we needed them less)
• Hitchhiking is a paradox to The Protestant Work Ethic: Youth feel entitled to a ride but need the charity of the driver to accomplish their work
• Cars used to be concentrated among farmers
• Hitchhiking becomes more acceptable with economic downturns
• Hitchhikers put effort into distinguishing themselves from vagrants
• Hippies embraced hitchhiking as a physical version of mind-altering drugs… Letting go and, literally, losing control
• Adjusting hitchhiking enforcement was a way to throttle the flow of hippies and liberal youth movements
• Reagan era politics shifted us from communal to personal
• As youth matured and gained wealth, they started to shun hitchhiking as a “poor person” thing

• A start-up is “the minimum number is people needed to make an idea happen”
• In business, money is either an important thing or the only thing
  • Only monopolies can afford to focus on anything else
• Monopolies are our definition of success
• In business, status quo is death
• Intersectionality is bad for startups
• Startups should avoid defining their target market so narrowly as to make them the top player
  • (If you, a start-up, will be a top player at launch, then the market must be tiny)
• Capitalism and competition are opposites
  • “Perfect competition” is communism without the central planning
• It is easier to dominate a smaller market
• Small does not equal non-existent
• Try to avoid disruption because it attracts undue attention and has inherent competition
• In an indefinite world, optionality is supreme
• “You are not a lottery ticket”
• “Leanness is a method, not a goal”
• (Be careful to not be so focused on adaptability that you fail to produce anything)
• Startups do better the less the CEO is paid
• Make your early team as personally similar as possible so they share a similar world vision
• Employees fight when they compete over responsibilities
• Sales is hidden in every business at every level
• A “product so good it sells itself” does not exist
• Great companies are more like feudal monarchies than democracies
• Complementariness is more powerful than competition

• Silent earthquakes are a thing
• “We did not build this broken house, but it is our house now”
• Castes are about power, not feelings
• In America, race is a strawman that maintains the caste
• Virginia colony had a special form of enslavement more extreme than in England
• We are shocked when the actors do not match the expected containers
• Rooting out offenders helps us think we solved the problem but does little
  • (Offenders are people who crossed a line. Excising them pushing them out of the system… but the system still remains.)
• Color does not indicate race (multiple “races” have the same shades)
• Color is a fact; Race is a social construct
• Caste is not inherently hatred
• Casting is based on
  • Assumption of divine will and laws of nature
  • Heritability
    • “If you can act your way out of it, then it is class not caste”
  • Endogamy and marriage control
    • (Restricting marriage to intra caste)
  • Purity vs pollution
    • Their degradation justified their degradation
  • Occupational hierarchy
  • Dehumanization and stigma
  • Terror as enforcement, cruelty as control
  • Inherent superiority vs inherit inferiority
• Dominant group threat syndrome
• True Alphas do not need to yell
• Omega’s act as a jester and pack glue
  • Because they can poke fun at everyone, they can defuse and mellow the group
• Culture is built to subordinate castes successes more than almost anything else
• “There is never ‘caste’ only ‘castes’”
• Caste usually trumps class
• We usually tend to defend our caste even if sacrificing self-interest
• Tolerance is not love; we need to love, not just tolerate

Note: I continue to be shocked at how bad the Federally sponsored Student Loan system is. Part of it is because, well, Government, but part is because it is big business and vested parties do not want to see the money slow.

• College is a hope for a better life through income
• It is also a symbolic acceptance of middle-class “values”
• Having to rely on government loans conflicts with the core concepts of independence
• For agrarian cultures, the entire economic system was based on free child labor
• Loans Direct requires repayment fresh out of college
• Planning requires stability, not the other way around
• Stuff feels important to have
• Future planning requires balance between providing now for providing later
• Standard forms–like FAFSA–render families liable to the government and infer appropriate relationships
• We blame the poor of having bad financial skills but do not have financial education
  • (It is interesting to me the mandating teaching financial literacy is so strongly opposed in so many places. I have not delved far into the reasons, but a cursory review seems to be that “teaching about money is the family’s responsibility”. I concur. As is all other education. I find this stance folly for three reasons:
    • teaching about money does not seem to have been adequate heretofore,
    • teaching about money in the classroom does not preclude families from teaching at home–just like any other subject–and,
    • how can the financially illiterate be expected to teach at all, if not well, something they do not know)
• Higher education transitioned from a “national” benefit (“this benefits the country”) in the 1900’s to a family benefit (“this mostly benefits a family”) in the 1980’s
  • With this transition, grants (for the public good) were replaced with loans (for the private good)
• Middle-class parents shield kids from financial conversations, which is often a bad thing
• Parent PLUS is based on credit history, thus unequally distributing benefits
• Children can feel stymied if they are making financially based decisions